I've been wanting to make a sandbox game for a while and have a complete concept in mind but I'm not exactly sure how to go about it programming wise. I'm not a very advanced python programmer but I can manage if I have the right resources to guide me. I'm looking for some ren'py games that have sandbox elements like navigation/inventory/quests and I would prefer games that do it efficiently but are not over complicated for someone like me. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
Ren'Py What are the best games to learn sandbox elements from?
- Thread starter Neurotica3D
- Start date
- Jun 25, 2017
- 2,487
- 7,023
I think what you're going to find is that there's no single way of writing a sandbox game - different games take wildly different approaches. (I tend to poke around inside them now and again to see how they do it.)
In Whores of Thrones, for which I'm the programmer, I take an approach with a game loop that uses Ren'py "calls" to do things like show the map, run an event, etc. Each thing that I call then returns "what should be done next" (go back to the map, advance time, etc.) So my code is very "subroutine"-like.
I've seen other games that take a completely "jump" approach - any time you go from one location to another, it jumps to the correct spot in the code.
However you choose to do it, you're likely to need some kind of "quest management" or "story line management" system to keep track of which bits of the various sequences have already been executed, which are now eligible to be executed, etc. I have one of those set up in WoT - it's probably not quite how I'd build it if I was doing it a second time, but it works. Again, every different game I've looked at that attacks that problem slightly differently as well.
So, this is probably going to be a very "what makes the most sense to you" thing.
- Aug 31, 2019
- 57
- 733
You can try looking at the code for milfy city, from what I remember the navigation in that game is pretty straight forward using jumps
- Oct 14, 2019
- 169
- 95
I always find it interesting to see how the other devs have solved the quest/story arc -management. For me, it has always felt far more complicated than the very straightforward navigation between locations/subareas, handling inventory or keeping track of (N)PC stats & scheduling NPC movement.
I' m not looking for any code examples (we use a different engine), but I'd love to see some design docs/class diagrams that describe how the "quest" logic is implemented.
I' m not looking for any code examples (we use a different engine), but I'd love to see some design docs/class diagrams that describe how the "quest" logic is implemented.